Beer Forum

I'm upgrading to a 15 gallon brew kettle in transitioning from extract to all grain. The full changeover take several months for financial reasons and I am wondering what the pros/cons are with doing a 10 gallon extract batch. Is it as easy as buying 2 kits? I suspect not. Would it be better for the brew quality to stay with 5 gallon batches until I have all of the all grain equipment? Thanks for any help.

The big thing going from 5 go 10 gallons is that it becomes too heavy/bulky to lift without burning/scalding the shit out of yourself. Another thing is that you MUST use efficient chilling mechanisms, or else you'll be there forever.

Assuming you have a strong enough heat source to actually boil 12 or more gallons, what that means is that you have to have your wort transfer (hoses/gravity or if necessary, a pump) ready to go and you have to be able to strain out the trub in place (false bottom or other wort pickup tube that helps keep the trub out inside your boil kettle), as well as get the wort chilled either in place (immersion chiller) or during transfer to the fermenter (counter flow or plate chiller).

Otherwise, its pretty much the same as a smaller batch, just using more ingredients.

hth

And it makes you infinitely cooler, on top of a good chiller & basically needing a pump.

Yeah I plan on having an immersion chiller before attempting 10 gallon batches. I was just wondering if there were any variables with regard to hops or yeast that may not be as simple as doubling the contents of a 5 gallon batch. It's a short term idea anyway. As soon as I have the chiller and mash tun it's on!

Just double it. It'll be fine.